When the judge threw out the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin this month after finding that the prosecution had withheld evidence that could have helped his defense, it left key questions that have hung over the case for more than two years unresolved.

But two members of the jury who spoke about the case publicly for the first time Saturday said in interviews that they had been far from convinced — given the evidence they had heard before the trial was brought to its abrupt end — that Baldwin was guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on a film set.

“As the week went by, it just didn’t, it didn’t seem like a very strong case,” Johanna Haag, known to the court as juror No. 7, said in a phone interview Saturday.

Gabriela Picayo, identified in court documents as juror No. 9, said she, too, had been having serious doubts about the case against Baldwin before it was dismissed.

A critical moment for her during the trial, she said, was when she learned that Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer who had loaded a live round into the gun that day, had already been convicted of involuntary manslaughter. “I’m still here, I’m still open to hearing and obviously trying to stay unbiased,” Picayo said of her thinking at the time, “but I was starting to move towards the direction of thinking that this was very silly and he should not be on trial.”

The trial centered on what happened Oct. 21, 2021, when Baldwin was rehearsing on the set of the film “Rust” in New Mexico with a gun that he had been told was “cold” — meaning that it should have contained no live ammunition — when it suddenly fired a bullet that killed Halyna Hutchins, the movie’s cinematographer.

Prosecutors argued at the trial that Baldwin had been reckless with firearms and violated gun-safety protocols, and that he should have participated in gun- safety checks to see what kind of ammunition it was loaded with. The defense countered that Baldwin had no reason to think that the gun had been loaded with a live round because live ammunition is generally forbidden on film sets, and underscored that he had been told that the gun was “cold,” meaning that it should have been impossible to fire. They said he had relied on the weapons-safety professionals in the film’s crew, who were supposed to check the gun.

In order to convict Baldwin, 12 jurors would have had to agree that he had committed involuntary manslaughter by finding, in part, that he had acted with a “willful disregard” for the safety of others on the set and that he “should have known” of the danger inherent in his actions. Saturday’s interviews with the two jurors provided the first indication that the prosecution had been struggling to convince at least some on the panel.

Picayo, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory with modest exposure to Baldwin’s work — “What was the show he was on?” she asked at one point — said that, as both sides presented evidence, she began to form the position that, as an actor, Baldwin should have been able to trust the experts on the set who oversee gun safety.

“Alec Baldwin is an actor, right?” she said, adding that she would not have expected him to know a lot about gun safety. “I think he would have trusted the people, you know, on the set to do their job.”

Both jurors described themselves as being affected by emotional — and, at times, graphic — footage that the prosecution showed at the trial of the aftermath of the shooting, taken from law enforcement body-worn cameras.

“Baldwin just looked shocked and stunned and so sad,” said Haag, who works in advertising and marketing. “It was clearly an accident, and the idea that there’s anything purposeful, or the idea that there was this grave carelessness that caused this, didn’t seem realistic to me.”

The judge’s finding that the prosecution had withheld evidence from the defense halted the trial before the jury could even begin to debate. Baldwin still faces several lawsuits over the fatal shooting that will deal with some of the same central questions.

But based on what Picayo heard during the first two days of the trial — which had been expected to last eight days — she said she had been leaning against a conviction.

“But,” she noted, “I wasn’t presented with all of the evidence, so I don’t know what could have swayed me.”

The trial took a dramatic turn when a lawyer for Baldwin began grilling a crime-scene technician about her handling of new evidence that could have shed light on how live rounds reached the set. “It was like a Perry Mason moment,” Haag said.

“At that point, I really started to feel sorry for Mr. Baldwin,” she continued. “I thought, you know, ‘What’s going on here? What is happening?’”

The judge overseeing the case, Mary Marlowe Sommer, sent the jury home from the Santa Fe County District Courthouse and held an extraordinary hearing about the withheld evidence. At one point, she left the bench and put on latex gloves to examine the evidence, a batch of ammunition that had been delivered to the sheriff’s office in March. At another point, the lead prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, called herself as a witness to defend her handling of the evidence.

The judge was unpersuaded, and dismissed the case permanently, ruling that the evidence had been intentionally withheld from the defense, and that it could have helped their case by allowing them to test the prosecution’s case of how live rounds had reached the set.

That afternoon, hours after the judge had sent them home, the jurors received a text message from the court.

“Trail CANCELLED,” the text read, misspelling the word trial.

The New York Times New Service